Brian: Hiroshima and Miyajima

The past two days were jam-packed and fun: all the SCTI students went to Hiroshima and Miyajima as part of the Bing trip. By the way, prefixing "Bing" before any event just means that Peter and Helen Bing, ridiculously wealthy and generous Stanford patrons, paid for it. I heard from somebody that the cost of the trip was about $400 per head.

We met up on Friday morning at the Kyoto eki at 8:45AM and took the Nozomi superexpress bullet train to Hiroshima, where we were met by a charter bus. The bus took us to an area of Hiroshima called Shintenchi which has good shopping and covered arcades. We ate lunch consisting of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, the main difference between it and Kanto style okonomiyaki being that there are noodles sandwiched between two thin layers of fried egg batter in the Hiroshima version, and just a pancake-like mix of ingredients in the Kanto style. It came with fried soba noodles, which I'm not a big fan of, so it was only passable in my opinion, although others who liked yakisoba thought it was delicious. After lunch, we walked to the A-bomb dome and the peace park. The A-bomb dome kind of sneaks up on you. You see a dilapidated looking building off to the side and before recognizing the famous bare-metal supports of the dome and realizing that that building was there when the bomb when off. We walked over the T-shaped Aioi bridge that was the target of the bomb, and to the Children's Memorial, where Japanese students were singing. It was really touching. From there we walked through the peace park, with the eternal flame opposite a cenotaph commemorating the bomb victims, and finally to the museum, itself an architectural marvel.

The museum really blew me away. I tried to read every panel in the museum because every detail was so interesting. There were memorandums from the National Archives that descried the motivations behind targeting Japan (ending the war sooner, primacy over the Soviets in the post-war era) and also how the selected the target, Hiroshima. There were scale models of the immediate surroundings before and after the bomb detonated, and you really get a sense of what 90% of buildings destroyed means. Then came the human element, with descriptions of family members searching for lost ones, charred remnants of clothing, and descriptions of the horrible injuries they suffered. I was so engrossed that I was the last one out of the museum and late to our arranged meeting time of 2:45PM. It was a really sad and humbling experience. There were some times that I almost wanted to cry, but I came away more knowledgeable about the incident and also somehow cathartically purged by witnessing the human tragedy that ensued.

We immediately traveled from the peace park to our ryokan (Japanese-style hotel) in Miyajima via charter bus and ferry. As the ferry took us across the bay, we could see a bright red tori emerge from the mist, a famous landmark of Miyajima (an island). On the walk from the port to the ryokan, we saw another famous aspect of Miyajima - the deer. At first we were excited to see such docile and friendly deer, but soon there were too many of them and I grew to perceive them as a nuisance. They'd very aggressively go after any food and would also eat through paper and clothing.

Our ryokan was really nice. The rooms, which fit 6 people, were really spacious, well decorated, and had a super good view of the bay and the red tori. Also, there were showers and baths in the basement and an outdoor bath as well. Us guys immediately showered and soaked in the bath and were joined in there by the director, Terry Macdougall. We had a nice chat about sumo wrestling. Dinner at night was spectacular. We had beer and a continuous parade of seafood delicacies. Everything was very large and fresh. The sashimi was so delicious I thought it was melting in my mouth. There were also 2 extremely large oysters per person. Refer to my pictures for more dishes (I forgot to take pictures of some of them though). We were all dressed in yukata (light robes) for dinner and of course it was the perfect time for photos. We relaxed and talked after dinner before heading to the beach for some more drinking. Around 10PM, Pat and Jeffrey and I headed back to take a bath in the outdoor onsen, which was only available between 10-11PM. Then, I hung out in Jeffrey's room until drunk people from the beach started showing up and I decided to go back to my room to sleep.

That night was really surreal. Michael and Pat got into a fight about something that escalated quite quickly and left the rest of us feeling really awkward in the room. After trying unsuccessfully to talk it out, Michael left by himself to take a walk. I also took a walk with Patrick to try to talk things out. The walk was actually very peaceful - it was pitch dark by then but we made our way carefully to another strip of beach we had never been to and watched the tide come in. The tori was no longer lit by spotlights by this time, so it cast a black silhouette against the city line of Hiroshima and its rippling black reflection on the water was also kind of creepy. Pat and I were able to talk through a lot of things and I felt like he was able to clear his head afterwards. By then it was past 3AM already when Pat went back to sleep. I wasn't sleepy so I hung out in another room until about 5AM, then departed once again to the beach to take pictures of the shrine at high tide in the morning. I was really tired for the rest of the day.

The other main thing we did on Saturday was climb Mt. Misen, the mountain in the middle of the island. Actually 4 of us took a ropeway gondola most of the way up, but it was still a really hard hike. It took us about 3 hours to complete it, and almost all of it was either climbing up or climbing down stairs. At least we were rewarded by a monkey park and some good views (that didn't turn out so good on camera). In the afternoon, Pat, Roel, Mary and I headed back to Hiroshima and did some shopping before hitting up the okonomiyaki place once more for dinner. Then it was arcade and sticky pics time until 9PM, when we took a bullet train back to Kyoto so that we could catch the last trains back to our respective host families. It all seems like a long continuous experience because I didn't get to sleep on Friday night. I did take naps every time we were on a bus or train though, so I am not substantially sleep deprived.

Hiroshima and Miyajima Trip